Over the past several years, the South Korean plastic surgery industry has become a sensationalized spectacle in mainstream American media as evidenced by some of the headlines published by BuzzFeed, which I’ve included above. Much of the conversation around plastic surgery and Korean women’s decisions to undergo cosmetic procedures has been centered around claims of an oppressive uniformity that is striving for whiteness. In articles such as the ones listed above, Korean women are often articulated as “victims” of internalized self-hatred and racism which implicitly heralds the US as a superior nation that is the source of desire and envy. However, this logic ignores and obscures the institutional players that have structured the development and success of the Korean plastic surgery industry. Dominant discourses around plastic surgery often lack a historicized and nuanced understanding of the political and economic forces at play such as the ways in which Japanese colonialism and US imperialism have shaped the practices, ideas, and ideals of South Korean beauty. Instead, mainstream media has suggested that Korean women’s desire for lighter skin, bigger eyes, and thinner, higher, and pointier noses indicates an envious yearning for “Western” and “American” physical traits. However, as Sharon Heijin Lee argues, this discourse “takes white Western women’s experiences as the telos of modernity” by situating white liberal American women as enlightened, liberated, and empowered.

The rhetoric surrounding the seemingly incomprehensible extremes that Korean women subjugate themselves to in their quest for perfection is one that posits the Korean body as a site of not only looking, but also active consumption. Articles such as BuzzFeed’s, “31 Crazy Before And After Photos Of Korean Plastic Surgery” and Gawker’s “Plastic Surgery Blamed for Making All Miss Korea Contestants Look Alike” attempt to construct the psyche of the Korean woman as irrational, illogical, and unstable by suggesting that deep-seeded insecurities have left young Korean women vulnerable and impressionable to the beauty demands of Korean society. Even the language used to describe the pageant in the Gawker article relies on trivializing and denigrating the pageant participants as “clones” in a “parade” that evoke a “Twilight Zone” quality. Through mainstream discourse and representation, the Korean body has been stripped, scrutinized, distorted, and dissected — both visually and rhetorically.

Furthermore, in “Koreans See Themselves With Plastic Surgery” and “Koreans Get Photoshopped With Double Eyelids And It Was So Weird”, Korean bodies take on a performative role as a result of a fetishized interest in the alteration of such bodies. Participants in the aforementioned videos function as visual reminders of natural beauty whose self-esteem has persevered, which simultaneously serves to implicitly chastise those who have gone under the knife. BuzzFeed’s penchant for virality situates Korean bodies as hyper-visible which reinforces the hegemonic white gaze and reifies the moral judgements made by such gaze.

Jezebel’s “I Can’t Stop Looking at These South Korean Women Who’ve Had Plastic Surgery”as mentioned in Lee’s piece, bears similarities toan article titled, “19 Grotesque Portraits Taken Directly After Plastic Surgery”, published by BuzzFeed which “reveals the agony that many Koreans undergo to attain beauty” as indicated by the author, Gabriel H. Sanchez. Both Stewart and Sanchez invoke a sensationalized narrative that carries a tone of not only disbelief, but also condemnation. The photographs included in Sanchez’s article portray the reality of post-surgery bodies without the glitz and glamor of Korean plastic surgery makeover shows such as “Let Me In”. However, the voyeuristic gaze which we, as viewers, are deploying through the practice of looking is structured around a power imbalance that privileges the viewer. The very nature of the “Miss Korea gif” and before-and-after photosets are online media productions designed to elicit a visceral response — one of mixed shock, disgust, and discomfort. Therefore, Korean women and plastic surgery practices offer the white Western audience not only a spectacle that is highly entertaining and addictive, but also serves as a case in point that reaffirms and reassures the US of its role as a global beacon of democracy and inequality, which follows an imperial logic of “West is Best”.

3 thoughts on “West is Best: BuzzFeed, Plastic Surgery, and the Korean Body as Performative”

I think it’s so interesting that sites like Jezebel and Buzzfeed herald themselves as liberal, progressive, diverse, a break from traditional, “mainstream” forms of media. Yet, they both approach non-Western/US centric topics using neoliberal, global feminist constructions, which ends up sensationalizing and other-izing these groups.

You mention a couple of videos where Koreans take on performative roles that dismiss plastic surgery in South Korea as a self esteem issue, and offer self-empowerment in the form of natural beauty as the solution. After watching the video, I realized that most of them shared similar stories; growing up, they were really exposed to the idea of plastic surgery as something compulsory. Some were told it was part of success and offered it as a birthday present. And at the end, they seemed pleased to not enjoy the altered photos. They all seem to paint their story of not going through with some form of cosmetic surgery as an achievement, where they were able to break through the norm. Yet, their point of comparison is “white, Western,” which doesn’t account for the differences between Korean and Korean-American. I think it’s so important to look at just how coded these messages of global feminism and neoliberal ideas of choice and self-esteem are.

This was a great analysis of the way supposedly “progressive” media both in the US and other parts of the West understand plastic sugeries abroad, on bodies that are then considered “alien” both in what types of surgeries they undergo and the warped explanation sites as Claire mentioned come up with that rely on a euro-centric beauty standards seemingly manifested on a global scale.

As shown in the Miss Korea gif example, the immediate response to what is perceived as the yearning for Korean women to be white and as a result, identical in appearance is met with horror and disgust (even as the gif was revealed to have been photoshopped), but it played directly on the perception of the Korean women as an outsider/alien, a replicable object versus an individual person whose desire to conform is completely backwards in the face of (believed to be) US individualism and the standardized beliefs of Western, neo-liberal feminism.

I find it interesting how a Korean women undergoing plastic surgery-considered a personal, individual choice when done by a white women in the US- somehow becomes a reflection of all Korean women and a homogeneity that has often been the prevailing understanding of Asian countries, plastic surgery then becoming a way of oppression only to be “solved” by gaining confidence and self-esteem in one’s own looks. The way liberal media outlets like Buzz feed, Gawker, and Jezebel, react and analyze plastic surgery in Korea feels more or less like a variation of the way a beauty salon would save the victimized women in Kabul after the Taliban’s restrictive and oppressive regime, solutions that do nothing to counter or confront the complex historical and cultural structures in place in both Korea and Afghanistan.

The kind of white western voyeurism of the gaze fixed on South Korean plastic surgery in the Buzzfeed articles you discuss become especially apparent when juxtaposing the way this American website views plastic surgery with the way South Korean viewers consume the makeover show Let Me In. The same kind of voyearuistic logic applies to Let Me In, which gives viewers a sense of disgust and repulsion along with the moralistic relief that they are not in the shoes of the people who are featured on the show. Whereas western viewers are fascinated and make a spectacle of images that show the healing process of individuals who undergo plastic surgery, Sanchez’s article literally calling them “grotesque portraits,” South Korean viewers are not interested in the stitches, bandages, and cuts. Rather, the spectacle is in the grotesque, almost deformed appearances of the contestants in the “before” stage of their transformation. While Let Me In has its own problems, the show’s fixation on turning the repulsed gaze on the “before” reveals Buzzfeed’s fixation with South Korean faces as one that is not natural or intuitive, but a result of white supremacist, imperialist values.

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